Peppermint Chocolate Bars
Finally, some guilt-free chocolate!
As I transitioned to a diet free of refined sugars, I had a period of about 2 months where my sweet tooth craved a dessert every night after dinner. To satisfy this sweet tooth, I would choose a treat that I wanted to eat and then find a way to make it sugar-free. The beauty of doing this was that after 1-2 months, I stopped craving desserts all together, and it was such a great feeling!
This post is about chocolate. I crave chocolate a lot, but I struggled to find a chocolate bar in my grocery store that was sugar-free (and free of artificial sugars). When I say sugar, I'm referring to refined/processed sugar. This includes high fructose corn syrup, cane sugar, and brown rice syrup, to name a few. Oh, and if you put the word "organic" in front of it, it's still sugar. Sorry!
I've heard people ask about healthier-sounding sugars like coconut sugar. After discussing this with Dale, we have decided that we're not experts in the field, but anything that has been refined to a granular sugar form probably shouldn't be going into your system. We tend to stick with maple syrup and honey as our sweeteners, but that's just us.
Going back to the chocolate, cocoa is naturally a bitter substance, so it needs to be sweetened to be palatable. Dale and I have spent hours in grocery stores looking at labels of chocolate bars. In all of Bangor, we were able to find one chocolate bar that was sweetened with honey instead of other sugars. It was about half the size of a Hershey's bar and cost over $5. Despite being very tasty, we needed to find a cheaper alternative!
The recipe below is for homemade chocolate that is sweetened with honey. I personally like adding shredded coconut and mint as noted below, but those are optional. You can add anything you want, and I think we're going to try one with chopped almonds next! My favorite part of this recipe is that it's super easy. So let's do this!
Ingredients:
1/2 cup (heaping) cocoa powder
4 tbsp coconut oil (melted to a liquid form)
1/4 cup honey
1/3 tsp peppermint extract (optional)
~1/4 cup shredded coconut, almonds, or other filler (optional)
Directions (are you ready?)
- Mix all ingredients together
- Spread out onto a piece of wax paper with a spatula
- Stick in freezer and let solidify
- Enjoy!
You can cut the chocolate into bars if you'd like, or you could just break off pieces as you want it.
Below is the version without mint or shredded coconut. It’s still tasty, but the peppermint is my weakness!
I do have one warning for you: If your housemates discover this chocolate, it won't last more than a few hours :).
That's all for now. Enjoy!